In the second trump, a rider in a plumed hat charges in on a shaggy little horse with his lance level. The man he is charging, in a conical hat and a striped robe, raises a fan to meet him. The ground they stand on ends at a band of green water. On the far side of it, upside down, a merman with a fringed green tail floats head first toward the bottom edge. Every trump in the pack is built this way. A scene at each end with a strip of sea between them, so the card reads from whichever end is facing you.
This is a playing deck. This is worth saying plainly, since a nineteenth-century tarot full of mermen invites other assumptions. The seventy-eight cards are the standard structure of the tarot game: four French suits of fourteen, twenty-one numbered trumps, and an unnumbered Fool. The Fool here is a harlequin in red and green lozenges with a starched ruff, balancing a small acrobat on a dish. The Paris trade called this type the tarot allemand, the German tarot, because the customers were the German-speaking colony in the city, who played tarock and wanted their cards laid out the way they knew them at home.
Someone in that trade then decided the German card players of Paris should have their trumps in Chinese dress. Temples, conical hats, fans, parasols, long striped robes, all of it part of a European chinoiserie fantasy. Below the waterline the invention goes somewhere else entirely: mermen, a lobster in pink and red, a green dragon with a yellow crest, fronds of weed climbing the card edges. The color is stencil work laid over a woodcut key block, à pochoir, in flat vermilion, olive, ochre and rose, and it is put on at workshop speed, which is a good deal of the charm.
The model is generally traced to A. Lefer, a Parisian cardmaker and stationer of the early nineteenth century who supplied the German community, and a Lefer-signed pack survives in the municipal library at Rouen. The design later passed to the firm of Lequart & Mignot, who kept it in production for decades. B. P. Grimaud spent the 1880s and 1890s buying up his Paris competitors, absorbed Lequart & Mignot at the start of the 1890s, and went on printing the Chinese tarot unchanged. His name runs across the trumps of this pack: “France et B. P. Grimaud.”
Consider what else Paris was producing while this deck sat on a shop counter. Papus published Le Tarot des Bohémiens in 1889 and called the tarot the absolute key of occult science, and Oswald Wirth, working under Stanislas de Guaita, had just drawn the twenty-two arcana that begin the whole line of initiatory decks. Grimaud served that trade as well, since the Grand Etteilla, the first tarot pack designed specifically for fortune-telling, came off his presses. The line between a game deck and a divining deck was always thinner than collectors like, and Etteilla himself built his system in the 1780s by reading an ordinary tarot before he designed one of his own. This pack is the game trade’s side of that decade, with its exoticism pointed at China while the occultists pointed theirs at Egypt.
The ace of clubs is nearly blank. One black club, and beneath it a blue circular stamp with Marianne in profile, RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE, DÉCRET DU 12 AVRIL 1890. The fiscal stamp provides a date after April 1890; it does not by itself establish the precise year of manufacture.
Complete examples of the Chinese tarot do come to market, and broken packs a good deal more often, so this is a deck to call uncommon and leave it there. What a collector wants is the full seventy-eight with the stamped ace still in place, which is what this is. The cards carry the marks of a pack that got used, with soiling, scattered spotting and softened corners. Turn any trump around and the sea comes up on top.
Fiscal mark: Ace of clubs bearing the blue stamp “RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE, DÉCRET DU 12 AVRIL 1890.”
[TAROT]. Tarots Allemand à 2 têtes Chinois [the “Tarot Chinois”]. Paris: B. P. Grimaud, ca. 1893.
Physical Description: 78 of 78 cards, complete (approx. 105 × 55 mm). Four French suits of fourteen (King, Queen, Knight, Valet, Ace to Ten) in Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades; twenty-one numbered trumps; one unnumbered Fool. Woodcut designs colored à pochoir (stencil) in vermilion, olive, ochre, blue-green and rose. Double-ended designs throughout, the trumps divided by a horizontal band of water with an inverted scene below. Arabic trump numerals at upper left and lower right, within a hatched triangular border. Rounded corners; thick card stock. Versos with an all-over diaper of small crosses and dots. Trumps printed with the legend “France et B. P. Grimaud.”
Condition: Marks of use throughout, with light soiling, scattered dark spotting and edge and corner wear; no tears. A good, complete deck. Without box or wrapper.
In the second trump, a rider in a plumed hat charges in on a shaggy little horse with his lance level. The man he is charging, in a conical hat and a striped robe, raises a fan to meet him. The ground they stand on ends at a band of green water. On the far side of it, upside down, a merman with a fringed green tail floats head first toward the bottom edge. Every trump in the pack is built this way. A scene at each end with a strip of sea between them, so the card reads from whichever end is facing you.
This is a playing deck. This is worth saying plainly, since a nineteenth-century tarot full of mermen invites other assumptions. The seventy-eight cards are the standard structure of the tarot game: four French suits of fourteen, twenty-one numbered trumps, and an unnumbered Fool. The Fool here is a harlequin in red and green lozenges with a starched ruff, balancing a small acrobat on a dish. The Paris trade called this type the tarot allemand, the German tarot, because the customers were the German-speaking colony in the city, who played tarock and wanted their cards laid out the way they knew them at home.
Someone in that trade then decided the German card players of Paris should have their trumps in Chinese dress. Temples, conical hats, fans, parasols, long striped robes, all of it part of a European chinoiserie fantasy. Below the waterline the invention goes somewhere else entirely: mermen, a lobster in pink and red, a green dragon with a yellow crest, fronds of weed climbing the card edges. The color is stencil work laid over a woodcut key block, à pochoir, in flat vermilion, olive, ochre and rose, and it is put on at workshop speed, which is a good deal of the charm.
The model is generally traced to A. Lefer, a Parisian cardmaker and stationer of the early nineteenth century who supplied the German community, and a Lefer-signed pack survives in the municipal library at Rouen. The design later passed to the firm of Lequart & Mignot, who kept it in production for decades. B. P. Grimaud spent the 1880s and 1890s buying up his Paris competitors, absorbed Lequart & Mignot at the start of the 1890s, and went on printing the Chinese tarot unchanged. His name runs across the trumps of this pack: “France et B. P. Grimaud.”
Consider what else Paris was producing while this deck sat on a shop counter. Papus published Le Tarot des Bohémiens in 1889 and called the tarot the absolute key of occult science, and Oswald Wirth, working under Stanislas de Guaita, had just drawn the twenty-two arcana that begin the whole line of initiatory decks. Grimaud served that trade as well, since the Grand Etteilla, the first tarot pack designed specifically for fortune-telling, came off his presses. The line between a game deck and a divining deck was always thinner than collectors like, and Etteilla himself built his system in the 1780s by reading an ordinary tarot before he designed one of his own. This pack is the game trade’s side of that decade, with its exoticism pointed at China while the occultists pointed theirs at Egypt.
The ace of clubs is nearly blank. One black club, and beneath it a blue circular stamp with Marianne in profile, RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE, DÉCRET DU 12 AVRIL 1890. The fiscal stamp provides a date after April 1890; it does not by itself establish the precise year of manufacture.
Complete examples of the Chinese tarot do come to market, and broken packs a good deal more often, so this is a deck to call uncommon and leave it there. What a collector wants is the full seventy-eight with the stamped ace still in place, which is what this is. The cards carry the marks of a pack that got used, with soiling, scattered spotting and softened corners. Turn any trump around and the sea comes up on top.
Fiscal mark: Ace of clubs bearing the blue stamp “RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE, DÉCRET DU 12 AVRIL 1890.”
[TAROT]. Tarots Allemand à 2 têtes Chinois [the “Tarot Chinois”]. Paris: B. P. Grimaud, ca. 1893.
Physical Description: 78 of 78 cards, complete (approx. 105 × 55 mm). Four French suits of fourteen (King, Queen, Knight, Valet, Ace to Ten) in Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades; twenty-one numbered trumps; one unnumbered Fool. Woodcut designs colored à pochoir (stencil) in vermilion, olive, ochre, blue-green and rose. Double-ended designs throughout, the trumps divided by a horizontal band of water with an inverted scene below. Arabic trump numerals at upper left and lower right, within a hatched triangular border. Rounded corners; thick card stock. Versos with an all-over diaper of small crosses and dots. Trumps printed with the legend “France et B. P. Grimaud.”
Condition: Marks of use throughout, with light soiling, scattered dark spotting and edge and corner wear; no tears. A good, complete deck. Without box or wrapper.
